THE NECESSARY DESICCATION OF EVERYTHING GOOD.—What! must we conceive of a work exactly in the spirit of the age that has produced it? but we experience greater delight and surprise, and get more information out of it when we do not conceive it in this spirit! Have you not remarked that every new and good work, so long as it is exposed to the damp air of its own age is least valuable—just because it still has about it all the odour of the market, of opposition, of modern ideas, and of all that is transient from day to day? Later on, however, it dries up, its “actuality” dies away: and then only does it obtain its deep lustre and its perfume—and also, if it is destined for it, the calm eye of eternity. 507. AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF TRUTH.—Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions as truth, we should nevertheless not wish them alone to exist. I cannot see why we should ask for an autocracy and omnipotence of truth: it is sufficient for me to know that it is a great power. Truth, however, must meet with opposition and be able to fight, and we must be able to rest from it at times in falsehood—otherwise truth will grow tiresome, powerless, and insipid, and will render us equally so. 508. NOT TO TAKE A THING PATHETICALLY.—What we do to benefit ourselves should not bring us in any moral praise, either from others or from ourselves, and the same remark applies to those things which we do to please ourselves. It is looked upon as _bon ton_ among superior men to refrain from taking things pathetically in such cases, and to refrain from all pathetic feelings: the man who has accustomed himself to this has retrieved his _naïveté_. 509. THE THIRD EYE.—What! You are still in need of the theatre! are you still so young? Be wise, and seek tragedy and comedy where they are better acted, and where the incidents are more interesting, and the actors more eager. It is indeed by no means easy to be merely a spectator in these cases—but learn! and then, amid all difficult or painful situations, you will have a little gate leading to joy and refuge, even when your passions attack you. Open your stage eye, that big third eye of yours, which looks out into the world through the other two. 510. ESCAPING FROM ONE’S VIRTUES.—Of what account is a thinker who does not know how to escape from his own virtues occasionally! Surely a thinker should be more than “a moral being”! 511. THE TEMPTRESS.—Honesty is the great temptress of all fanatics.(15) What seemed to tempt Luther in the guise of the devil or a beautiful woman, and from which he defended himself in that uncouth way of his, was probably nothing but honesty, and perhaps in a few rarer cases even truth. 512.